Details

Emulator used: Bizhawk 1.6.0

Aims for fastest time

Manipulates luck

Takes damage to save time

Abuses programming errors

Still saves the animals

About the run

Not long after the making of the Arbitrary Code TAS total found another way to trigger the ending early. When you get far enough OoB X-Ray starts behaving oddly and writes over a lot of RAM addresses. The further down you are the more gets overwritten, and getting far enough down allows the escape sequence to be triggered (and the trigger to save the animals!). This lead to an improvement of 7102 frames over the previous run, and a run which definitively obsoletes both the ACE TAS and the previous X-Ray TAS (although I have hopes that the former can be utilized in the future as a starting point to make something interesting with the usage of arbitrary code execution).

Besides that there's not much to say. Nothing particularly new happens until the very end, and I didn't manage to find any improvements over the old X-Ray TAS in comparable parts except for an odd quirk I found when making the 100% run that reduces the door lag slightly when escaping the Bomb Torizo, and everything else beside the OoB stuff is fairly straight forward.

Thanks to

Big thanks to total for finding the X-Ray glitch (or rather, finding that you could trigger the ending with it), as well as for providing me with a lua script for hitbox detection that helped a lot when navigating OoB. Also thanks to the Super Metroid speedrunning community for pushing this category further and further

feos: I did numbers, and they are going to be surprising for some people.

There's also the very in-game time run's submission thread, where 46 people want that run to be published alongside to the real-time one, and 15 people don't want it. And the judge's decision was to publish it as a separate branch.

So the community's decision was back then to have that run separately, and now it's to not touch it. However, if a new version of the real-time run is made, that issue will be brought back up, since these 2 are the runs with the most content overlap. It's just currently, Saturn's movie is way more up-to-date than Tako & Kriole's.

So I'm accepting this submission to Moons, to obsolete "GT code, game end glitch" and "X-Ray glitch" by the "game end glitch" title. If some real playaround-style arbitrary code movie is made, all the content from the ACE run will most likely be seen again there, and even more, so that people don't miss it for too long.

As for the borderline between this (and the 2 glitched) runs, and all the rest - it is killing Mother Brain. Glitched runs skip that, as well as bosses, other runs don't. Killing Mother Brain is the thing that is obviously intended by the developers, and required to beat the game, so doing so means the run used the intended route. Ignoring it means it used the unintended (glitched) route.